Dummies Guide to EASY silver bullion refining at home as a long term precious metal investment

Originally posted by davespanners
reply to post by Wrabbit2000

 

3 grams of silver as far as I can tell is worth about $3.20. so minus the filters / gloves / acid / cost of the coins and the hour or so of work to make it.

Its more or less worthless at this point

Might even be making a loss

edit on 19-2-2012 by davespanners because: (no reason given)

Those 2 coins were solely for the purpose of the tutorial.
Naturally you'd ramp it up and process say 10 or 20 coins at a time ... you'd obviously use a bit more acid but the gloves, filters, etc remain the same ... and processing 20 coins takes exactly the same time as processing 2 coins.
But the end yield of silver is 5 or 10 times greater.

And did you miss the main point of the thread title ?

... long term precious metal investment

Here I'm talking about 2, 5 or even 10 years investment term. So even if I was to make a slight loss NOW producing that silver bullion, one would expect that over time the increase in silver prices would more than compensate.

I am a retired gold miner and i have processed silver contacts from large electrical breakers using nearly the same process.
I also use to do gold and silver assays of ores. and processing of gold and silver mill concentrates.

Your 99.9 is close enough to sell to a refiner but gold and silver ingots need to be .999 fine

One trick if your silver has a lot of base metals in it is to melt it with lead.
This is the best way to do electrical contacts that are silver on a tungsten sponge because you can not melt the silver off the tungsten with a torch but the lead will mix with the silver and the tungsten will float on top.

To remove the lead from the silver you use bone meal
en.wikipedia.org...

dampen the bone meal and put it in a old tuna can then take a spoon and make a bowl indention in the bone meal and let dry then bake in a oven at 130ºF for 2 hours to really dry it out

Place your lead silver mix on in the bone meal bowl and melt till red hot and watch the button shrink.
when it quits shrinking and you see a little flash (wink) from the button the lead has been absorbed by the bone meal and the silver is left.

Then you can treat the silver with nitric till its in solution. but i do the next part a little different i dilute the silver nitrate to about ten % before adding copper. and cool the mix.
Instead of gray powder i get nice silver crystals that are easier to work with. i also use a flux when melting the silver button silver brazing flux as your button will be cleaner.

Another source of silver is copper water pipe joints as they use silver solder on the joints.

Research wet chemical and fire assaying and you will come up with other ways to separate gold and silver from base metals and even gold and silver ore concentrates.

Commendable post. Had to star each entry. would star more if possible. It is appreciated. This manner of general knowledge is not common. Thank you.

But if I may. Would it not be an additional safety precaution to have a neutralizing agent close by in the happen stance acid or the solution is accidentally splashed. And would sodium bicarbonate ( baking soda ) act as a sufficient neutralizer ?

I look forward to your post on extracting gold.

Crikey and here is was hoping this wouldnt go viral till i tied up the market........
\\\\\\\\\\\\\silver palated items could be reverse electroplated i believe.
once set up the process can be a continuous one simply adding more plated items when nessessary.....
Its the same as electroplating just done backwards so the silver comes off the plate and collects on a silver starter annode....or was it cathode?

with an investment of AUD 20 + the acid you made about USD 130 worth of silver (125 gramm?)

nice hobby i would say.

how to get the gold containing items cheaply?

bookmarked this thread, i think im gonna switch hobbies

can't wait for your thread on how to make gold!

Wow! Thanks for this! Alchemy in raw form right here. I was looking to spend my money on something, now here it is!

Originally posted by nagabonar
with an investment of AUD 20 + the acid you made about USD 130 worth of silver (125 gramm?)

nice hobby i would say.

how to get the gold containing items cheaply?

bookmarked this thread, i think im gonna switch hobbies

can't wait for your thread on how to make gold!

I have one answer for that: broken computers. Microsoft used to sell broken PCs and monitors by the palette and guys would melt them down for the gold and silver. Also buy peoples junk bridgework and old jewelry off ebay.

I have a question. Most of the Silver Coins I see on eBay are 90%. Are those the correct ones to use?

Originally posted by el1jah
:bowdown:
I`ll probably never use this knowledge, but thankyou for taking the time, I enjoyed reading all that for some reason lol super interesting.

I had the exact same reaction. Cool as sh

How many more high school students would love chemistry if this was the first experiment they saw?

reply to post by tauristercus


Dear Tauristercus,
Great thread, star and flag for you! However I wanted to add my opinion to this, which is that this is really only a short term money making exercise, in the grand scheme of things when TSHTF, gold and silver will be rendered worthless and goods (food, ammo, clothing etc..) will then be worth their weight in gold.

I don't buy into the precious metal end of the world hype, but your thread was definately educating and enlightening so thank you kindly for that.

T

Great thread and thanks for posting it! Some questions. What if the silver is mixed with other metals beside just copper will the same procedure work? Also what about circuit boards is it worth the trouble and will the non metallic parts of the board be a problem or is that a whole different procedure?

Look forward to your tutorial in refining Gold.

reply to post by tauristercus


How do you dispose of any waste, especially acid waste?

Can you give a list of common items around the house/scrap yards that you've learned that contain any type of precious metal?


Thank you for the post, I will try this.

Flagged, Starred and saved, mate you are awesome!

I'm 17 and I'm having a bit of a bad luck streak when looking for jobs. How much did it cost you to start this up? I mean with the coins, acid, flamethrower, paper and what not?

My budget is somewhere in the $50s

I want to know because I want to attempt this here in Brisbane as well.

reply to post by tauristercus


Electrician by trade
Over the last few year have got a 5 gals pale full of contact of power relay
Think I will give it a try this summer

What a great thread, this I have got to try.

Would love to see your gold making thread aslo.

If I could give you more than 1 star and flag, I would! This is a VERY informative and well done post! Love it man! Thanks for my next project hobby!!!

Very cool read, S&F to OP.

Saw someone mention that things like silver and gold won't have in value if things take a very bad turn.

That is true in some ways, but keep in mind that unlike paper money (which is backed by a government), precious metals like silver and gold will still be considered of high value.

If we get down to people just trying to survive to live, then more than likely no one will care about silver and gold, and will be looking into more practical things to help with survival.

However, survive long enough and chances are there will be another infrastructure in place, and it would not be all that far fetched to see a general currency put back in place. And it would not be surprising at all if that currency is in the form of precious metals again.

Or if nothing else, you can do this NOW while these metals have value to increase your income that will allow you to invest in things that would be more practical if civilization does come to an end, those things you feel might have more value. For example, use the extra money from doing this to invest in large quanities of booze.
If TSHTF, won't matter what happens to the value of gold or silver. One thing people WILL want, is something to drink other than water!

Again, good thread OP, I enjoy learning how to do new things.

WOW You're too awesome

reply to post by tauristercus


cool stuff posting for bookmark

oh yeah i spose ill ask. where do you despose of the nitric acid?

Originally posted by Mizzijr
I have a question. Most of the Silver Coins I see on eBay are 90%. Are those the correct ones to use?

Silver coins are generally worth more not melted these days because of both intrinsic value (how much silver is in them) as well as their numismatic (coin collector) value. Additionally, when you buy a coin, people know for certain how much silver is in there because the percentage is required by the mint whereas if you make a lump of shiny stuff, it's difficult to prove the purity and amount. I really am trying to help out here because if you melt your silver, my coins are worth more .

"Most of the melting took place in 1979 and 1980, when silver bullion soared to an all-time high of $50 an ounce. At that point, common-date silver coins were worth far more as metal than as money or collectibles. Even scarcer items could be melted at a profit.

The value of silver has plummeted since then. In recent weeks, it has hovered around $5 an ounce and the melts have been reduced to a virtual standstill. Nonetheless, the shape of the coin market has been changed dramatically by the earlier melts, and the future course of the hobby -- for better or worse -- has been altered permanently.

Something else seems clear regarding the melts themselves: While common-date coins and circulated pieces made up the bulk of the items that were melted, scarcer ones frequently bit the dust, as well. Although they had premium value as collector's items, many were worth even more as mere metal when bullion prices shot through the roof.

Many silver proof coins were melted, for example. So were certain semi-key silver coins in lesser grades.

"Essentially," Carr observed, "the key coins now are common, since they're the ones that were saved -- and the formerly common coins are now rare, since most of them were melted." - www.pcgs.com...

There are certainly other products you can melt to create art that contain silver that may cost less than coins. Just some things to consider, not trying to lecture anyone.